Collecting recipes - hard work but worth it

I risk being thought of as a bit of a trainspotter with this post.  As I have mentioned before I got sick of having lots of cook books – most of which only had a few recipes I would ever use.  So some years ago I decided to create my own recipe book/s.

I bought some school exercise books – ring bound ones – very cheap.  I divided them up into – soups, starters, salads and vegetables, mains, eggs & sauces and desserts.

I taped all my cuttings etc into the books.  Then I started on my least favourite cook books and felt like a vandal as I ripped out the recipes I wanted.  But I did find that the recipes ended up being so much less bulky than keeping the whole book.

The key to this working, though, is that I did an index for the recipes which I keep updated.  The index is by ingredient – so if I have lots of lemons, for instance, I can just look up lemons in my index and see all the recipes I have so that I can inspired as to what to do with them.

This might sound like quite a lot of work.  But I only update the books once or twice a year – generally when I am on holiday.  And when you do it, boy do you get hungry!

So now I only have about 5 cookbooks plus my recipe books.  The cookbooks I couldn’t part with include:

Stephanie Alexander’s Cooks Companion

Edmonds Cook Book – a NZ classic

3 Thai cookbooks – 2 from Spirit House and one from David Thomson

I do have a couple of Jamie Oliver books left but may give them the tough love treatment next year.

On re-reading this, I realise that I missed an opportunity to make the covers of my own recipe books beautiful.  But although they aren’t pretty, they are so useful.